Climate is a persistent asset, bar none: changes in climate-related stocks have consequences spanning over centuries or possibly millennia to the future. To reconcile the discounting of such far-distant impacts and realism of the shorter-term decisions, we consider hyperbolic time-preferences in...

World income grows fast without verifiable climate-change impacts on the economy. The growth spell can end if climate impacts turn real but this can take decades to learn. We develop a tractable stochastic climate-economy model with a hidden-state impact process to evaluate the contributions of...

Should public assets such as infrastructure, education, and the environment earn the same return as private investments? We consider if time-inconsistent decision-makers can gain from institutions that enforce cost-benefit rules on large projects that influence the economy as a whole. Long-term...

I define “generous sustainability” as a combination of two conditions: neither instantaneous maximin income nor attainable maximin income should decrease over time. I provide a formal definition and study applications to an AK economy, a Ramsey economy, and a Climate Economy. Generosity is...

We consider a model of cake-eating with private information. The model captures phenomena such as trust and “security of supply” in resource-use relationships. It also predicts supply shocks as an equilibrium phenomenon: privately informed sellers have incentives to reveal resource scarcity...

The stabilisation of GHG atmospheric concentrations at levels expected to prevent dangerous climate change has become an important, global, long-term objective. It is therefore crucial to identify a cost-effective way to achieve this objective. In this paper we use WITCH, a hybrid...

Most analyses of the Kyoto flexibility mechanisms focus on the cost effectiveness of “where” flexibility (e.g. by showing that mitigation costs are lower in a global permit market than in regional markets or in permit markets confined to Annex 1 countries). Less attention has been devoted to...

This paper builds on the assumption that OECD countries are (or will soon be) taking actions to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. These actions, however, will not be sufficient to control global warming, unless developing countries also get involved in the cooperative effort to reduce GHG...

This paper provides a quantitative comparison of the main architectures for an agreement on climate policy. Possible successors to the Kyoto protocol are assessed according to four criteria: economic efficiency; environmental effectiveness; distributional implications; and their political...

This paper analyses the cost implications for climate policy in developed countries if developing countries are unwilling to adopt measures to reduce their own GHG emissions. First, we assume that a 450 CO2 (550 CO2e) ppmv stabilisation target is to be achieved and that Non Annex1 (NA1)...